Jay Carney ducks Angry Birds surveillance question

The White House wouldn’t comment specifically Monday on intelligence agencies’ surveillance of terror suspects and their contacts through mobile apps including Angry Birds, but a reporter’s sharp-tongued question on the issue did draw some laughs.

“I’m not in a position to discuss specifics on intelligence collection,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said during his daily press briefing. “But to be clear, as the president said in his Jan. 17 speech, to the extent data is collected by the NSA through whatever means, we are not interested in the communications of people who are not valid intelligence targets. And we are not collecting the information of ordinary Americans.”

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Carney takes over W.H. Instagram

Drawing on documents shared by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the New York Times reported Monday that the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters have been working together since 2007 to collect and store data from dozens of apps. So-called “leaky” apps release data including phones’ identification codes and locations onto networks, the Times said, making it ripe for the picking by spies.

In asking about the surveillance through apps, Victoria Jones of Talk News Radio Service framed her question around the avian app.

“The NSA is lurking in the background of your game of Angry Birds, waiting to scoop up all your personal data as you lob hapless creatures into the air,” she said. “This is the last bastion of American freedom has been breached. I mean, there seems to be something particularly egregious about going after leaky apps”

While making clear that he couldn’t discuss specific means of data collection, Carney stressed that surveillance efforts “focused on valid, foreign intelligence targets and not the information of ordinary Americans”

The U.S. and British spy agencies have also worked together to share strategies for collecting data from mobile versions of Google Maps, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and Twitter, among other services, the Times said.